Six years ago at a market stall in Havana I bought a black Che Guevara T-shirt inscribed with that famous letter he wrote to Fidel Castro entrusting his wife and children to his care if he, Guevara, died attempting to liberate Bolivia. It was heroic stuff and the only thing I'd read by him until now. Typical. You wait six years for a Che and then three come along. HarperCollins have brought out this handsomely packaged, unabridged trilogy (well, almost - the bike ride and Bolivia are all there, Cuba has been edited a bit) to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Cuban revolution. Che, Castro's friend and fellow revolutionary, has become an icon whose portrait, handsome, bearded, ravaged, gazing into history beneath that equally iconic black beret, has adorned every self-respecting student's bedroom wall since his death in 1967. The Cuban memoirs are easily the best. His motorcycle trip through Argentina, Bolivia, Peru and Chile, breaking down, falling off, getting drunk and pulling girls, reminded me, unfairly, of that fatuous Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman round-the-world freebie. Maybe I just don't like motorbikes. The Bolivian diary, because you know how it ends, is too sad to bear, but his passionate account of the two years he spent with Castro's revolutionary army in Cuba is both powerful and poetic. "We wound up on solid ground, lost, adrift. We were an army of shadows, of ghosts who walked as if following the impulse of some dark psychic mechanism." Guevara was originally taken on as the guerillas' doctor, and there are graphic descriptions of jungle surgery and his own debilitating asthma attacks. But when at one point he has to choose between grabbing his medical equipment or a box of ammunition, he goes for the bullets. Grateful as I am for this rich mix of idealism, endurance, treachery and heroism, I do have one gripe. Why does the reader have to put on that appalling Spanish accent? To make Che sound more authentic? Alas not. It makes him sound like Manuel in Fawlty Towers.